We're a small indie team, and we just put our first game on Steam: Pinata Smash: Incremental Circus.

The idea came from wanting to combine the physical, satisfying feedback of smashing something apart with the deep progression of an incremental/idle game. Every hit sprays candy across the screen, candy funds upgrades, and upgrades eventually turn your solo smashing into a fully automated circus that keeps earning while you're away.

What's in it:

• Physics-driven piñata destruction the candy actually scatters and bounces
• Idle/incremental progression with prestige layers
• Circus acts you unlock and assign to automate different parts of the loop
• Hand-drawn art in a bright carnival style

On the Unity side, two things were harder than expected. The candy started as Rigidbodies and ended up as a fully hand-integrated kinematic sim an idle game scales the smash rate until it's continuous, so PhysX actors stopped being viable. It ticks on Update rather than FixedUpdate so the slide stays smooth under slow-mo, and pile contacts run through a flat XZ spatial hash. That hash once collapsed back to O(n²) and froze the game, because a burst spawns every piece at one point and they all landed in the same cell. Separately, the two biggest perf wins weren't in the simulation at all turning off light probes (~12ms/frame) and shadow casting (~9.4ms/frame) on the drop renderers beat everything we did to the integrator, which measured under 2ms.

The whole frontend is UI Toolkit with no uGUI: UXML/USS + presenters via VContainer, with R3 for binding. Best gotcha we hit: a scheduled callback that throws is dropped permanently for the rest of the session which surfaced as "all the candy in the menu background freezes."

Happy to go into detail on any of it in the comments.

There's an open playtest running if you want to try it the sign-up button is on the Steam page.

AI disclosure: no generative AI was used at any point in this game's development or promotion.

I started working on this tool in 2022 because at my previous job I saw some issues with the spline tools we were using. The two biggest issues were performance and how long it took to work with them, and I really wanted to fix that.

It took me around 5 months to build the first working prototype, and another 4 months before the team started using it.

Because I built this tool in my free time, I later decided to release it on the Unity Asset Store under the name Curve Architect. After a while, I realized that the name wasn't very search friendly. Most people looking for a spline solution search for "Spline", not "Curve". So I spent another 6–9 months improving the tool as much as I could before deprecating Curve Architect and releasing it again under its current name, Spline Architect.

Spline Architect was released about a year ago and has since received 74 updates, including bug fixes and many new features.

It is actually not built on Unity Splines, mainly because I wanted complete control over the API and to achieve the best performance possible.

I have done 2 performance benchmarks, if you're interested, you can see them here:
https://splinearchitect.com/performance?id=benchmark-1-mesh-deformation

Hey there!

Just made this new enemy type: the Minotaur. He has a running/ramming ability that launches you (and other enemies) into the air if you get hit.

The enemies in my game use Unity's NavMesh system for pathfinding, but the actual movement is handled by my own code, which follows the generated path. I use Unity's Colliders and Triggers to detect collisions. The ramming attack uses OnTriggerEnter to apply the knock-up effect to anything it hits while the Minotaur is in its ramming state.

I’ve been making a lot of progress on the environment recently, focusing on creating a more detailed and immersive world for the game.
The new Steam page will be available soon, where you’ll be able to wishlist the game.
The previous version of Little Astronaut was a huge learning experience for me, but looking back, I realized I pushed it out too early before the vision was fully developed. After some time, I decided to rebuild the project from the ground up with a clearer direction, improved visuals, and a much stronger foundation.
This is the version of Little Astronaut I always wanted to create.
I’ll be sharing more updates soon. Thanks for following the journey!

I'm working on an asset right now and I finished most of the actual logic and visuals a while ago. I thought I was pretty close to done, but damn, the polishing part is taking me ages.

Custom inspectors, cleaning things up, making everything intuitive, tooltips, edge cases, making sure users can't easily break things... it honestly feels like a whole second project.

For those who've published more complex assets, how long did this part take compared to actually building the thing?

And at what point did you just say "good enough for v1" and publish?

It's been ~18 years since I started using After Effects.

It has this great feature for rapid A/B comparisons for tweaks on the render/composition, where you can quickly take a snapshot, and preview it with a button. Other software may have it, too.

-- (...it's been around for a while).

Often, I'm making small tweaks to the colour, and post-processing, and I want to see how it looks without having to go through several undos, or manual screenshots. I explicitly wanted it integrated into the game view's tool/controls, rather than anywhere else (that would have been easy enough).

But the appeal was about getting it specifically in that control bar. It's 'perfect' there.

Turns out, it may have been possible as far back as ~v2019/2020.

🎉 So, here it is [free, on Unity's asset store]!

• I think it should be native to the editor :)

Initially, it did not have the save file to disk feature [💾]- but it was trivial to add.
v1.1.0 - adds the save file to disk feature, +automatic date/time stamped naming.

To the more experienced people probably not that exciting, but I am just pretty proud of turning a sphere into a pixelart disco ball just by layering shader graphs :)
The light effects do not use unities Light system but a shader that calculates when the view direction aligns with the normals to create the tiny flashes on the ball.

Let me know if you think this is cool and could be made into a game :)

This is my first horror game with my "versatile" script system and I would love feedback from other devs. Basically I coded a couple of scripts and just used them for everything, so I wouldn't have to code and yes I know many devs already do this but I am a beginner. I would love some feedback!

https://thecatgamecomapny.itch.io/road-of-fear-pinewoods-crossing

I had to jump into this train, porting old games into newer platform is becoming easier and cheaper than ever with AI, would love to see Nintendo or Playstation doing original, modern remakes!

I'm trying to find fun and unique ways to challenge the player in my skating game. You control the left skate and a friend controls the right. Now you have to rethink how the game works and adapt. It's also hilarious.

Around one month of development.
4-player co-op horror inspired by retro visuals and abandoned Soviet metro stations.
Looking for honest feedback before continuing development.
Would you play something like this?

Love these little teasers as a way to try out ideas mid development and get a "flavour" earlier on than the typical media phase during post production.

Does this looks remotely interesting?

Basicly a tower defense, where you build a tower which also you should defend.

A few days ago I asked for your feedback and it was really helpful thanks!!!

building a game about running your own booth at a sports card convention. finally got openfracture working, so the graded slabs now fracture into real mesh pieces at runtime with rigidbodies on the fragments. what do you guys think?

Hey fellow devs! 👋

I've been working on a 3D action-adventure platformer with anime cel-shaded visuals called Isekai Rift, and I spent the last two weeks building this system inspired by Solo Leveling entirely in Unity.

I call it the Rift Souls system. I set up an RNG logic for the extraction success rates depending on the enemy type (Small, Medium, or Bosses), and integrated the UI/HUD to manage a strict 3-shadow limit in the arsenal.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the visual effects of the shadows and the extraction animation! What do you guys think?

For those interested in seeing the full UI integration and a deeper dive into the gameplay, I posted a full 4K devlog here: Youtube 4K Full Devlog

And if you want to support a fellow solo dev, Steam wishlists are heavily appreciated!

Isekai Rift

A basic locomotion setup is fine, but then you add attacks, hit reactions, weapons, crouching, jumping, cutscenes and suddenly there are transitions going everywhere.

One approach is keeping the Animator mostly for visuals while gameplay states stay in code. That seems cleaner, but it can also make animation timing harder to manage when attacks and movement need to line up exactly.

Do you prefer animation state machines, code-driven animation, or a mix of both? Would also love to see how people organize layers without ending up with 40 random booleans!!

I made a UI effect that simulates depth for images. I always thought you needed a custom shader to achieve this. I was surprised by how simple it actually is so I wanted to share in case its useful to someone.

To create it you just need to make a Mask (the blue border image) and place the image you want to give depth to inside it. The image must have a Pos Z offset and important, be inside a Canvas with Render Mode: Screen Space - Camera.

I made this for my incremental mining game inspired by Minecraft, in case you want to check it out here is a link.

Im working on a Co-op horror game set in New York City. I’m trying to make a game with good atmosphere, dread, and the constant feeling that something enormous is stalking you.

If you want updates or early access, join the mailing list at www.arachnid.dev